All the Stories You Never Wanted to Read. Updated most Sundays and Wednesdays.

History

While Odysseos was off traveling and fighting (and getting lost, pff, men) Penelope had to stay at home, raise a child, take care of a city, fend of suitors, take care of civic and religious responsibilities, all without offending anyone and maintaining relationships with any allies she could gather. She is known for her loyalty and, most importantly for Greek men, for not jumping into bed with a man who was not Odysseos. Greek men were really terrified of women’s sexuality and did everything they could to control it. *major eye roll* ANYWAY. What I, personally, love about Penelope is how bad-ass she is. She is able to juggle a lot of responsibilities and has to be majorly smart to outwit all of the idiots that surround her. I also love her loyalty, but really, I love how smart she is.

I don’t, alas, have time to do full Iliad posts – yet. BUT, I miss this and I want to be able to post SOMETHING for you all, so I have a couple of “Meanwhile In…” posts for you. Because the Iliad is super MANLY MEN I thought it would be fun to think about what is happening at home with the lady-folk who got left behind.

A few Mondays ago I got a book in the mail entitled Hittite Prayers by Itamar Singer, as part of the Writings From the Ancient World Series. (Which was very exciting. I almost stopped breathing trying to explain to my mum how excited I was because, yes, I am that much of a nerd.) While reading it today (in between editing pictures, because my editing program is so ridiculously slow) I came across this line:

“You stride through the four eternal corners. The Fears run on your right, the Terrors run on your left” (No. 4c, 6.i-61).

This, of course, reminding me of The Iliad when the Trojans and Achaeans are facing off to battle after Menelaus is wounded:

“Behind them, Ares, as behind the Greeks/ The goddess Athena with sea-grey eyes,/ And on both sides Terror and Panic” (Lombardo, 4.471-3).

I doubt that there’s any true connection there between the Hittite equivalent of Shamash (a sun god) striding around with Terror and Panic and two Greek gods running around with Terror and Panic, but it intrigues me, especially because I am interested in the Hittite underlining of this Greek epic.

*Those on the right should be recognizable as Panic, Terror, Athena, and Ares. On the left we have Shamash wearing his epic hat and holding something that I’m sure is important in his hands. Next to him are the two viziers Bunene and Misharu both of whom I want to do more research on.

ALSO, I drew Diomedes with a little bit of scruff to show that time has past, because I feel like so much time has gone by with people just staring at each other or being dramatic.

Sthenelus looks a lot like how I drew Macbeth back when I was teaching. Whoops.

Also, also: yes. I have a ridiculous love of Alliteration that borders on the absurd. Shhh…

In the second to last panel you will see Terror and Panic. Panic actually showed up riding a horse in one of the previous posts. If you can find him you will prove that you have way too much time on your hands. Haha… Ahem. Sorry. One day I will actually have prizes of some sort that I will award you. I’ll be working on that this month *fingers crossed*

ANYWAYS. Next week will be “First Blood” and everything gets serious for awhile. If there is humour it will be rather macabre. BUT ALSO DIOMODES is going to be starring in most of Book 5 & 6, so we can all look forward to that.

Happy New Year, lovelies! I know it’s been awhile 0_0 Don’t worry! I am working on a backlog. I’ve drawn up all of book 4 and I’m in the process of editing the photos, which is being more difficult than I would like it to be. HOWEVER, being that I’m working in retail land I’ll have very few hours the end of this month and we should be back on track either the last week of January or the first week of February. I do apologize for the gap in time *sobs inconsolably*

Have a good month and start to your New Year! Agamemnon and et al will be returning soon!

Last time we talked about Homer and whether or not he really existed. HOWEVER, whether or he was real or merely a legend, we are left with the same problem when viewing the text. In fact, everything in this post will be applicable for pretty much any of the Greek or Roman texts that I will reference in the future, so this post is not only relevant for The Iliad, but for other ancient texts as well.

These texts have a very different bias than we do (or, at least, it most likely does, unless you are a rare and mysterious individual) and therefore there are some major Potentials For Miscommunication. Some of these PFM’s are listed below:

Time. These epics were created and written down many, many years before I was born, and therefore, many, many year before you were born (unless you are a time-traveling doctor or a girl named Julianna, who is secretly thousands of years old). The way people lived back then was very different from how we live now (especially to us living in the modern Western world). Even how we view the concept of time may be different. Consider, for example, the Mesoamericans and their quadripartite concept of time — very few people will even know what that means, but for a pre-conquest Mesoamerican it was just a part of life. So too might the Greeks or Romans view time conceptually different than however you do.

Place. None of us are living in Ancient Greece or on the Ionian Coast. Most of you are not even living in Greece or Turkey. (If you are: while this PFM is not as terrible for you, the landscape has still changed quite a bit since the Stone/Bronze/Iron Age.) The Mediterranean world is different geographically from, say, the Hudson or Wyoming Valleys. Therefore, the land you are looking at and living in is not the same land Agamemnon would have looked at or lived in. [A person’s Sense of Place and the Significance of Place is something I will probably go into more detail later.]

Language. These were written in an old form of Greek (or Latin) that no one actively speaks anymore. You will most likely be reading a translated text. Every time you translate something, you re-make it. Every translator is going to bring their own views and vocabulary to the text. It’s impossible not to. So even if you are reading the original text it is still a translation, because YOU are translating it. You are not an ancient Greek, and therefore no matter what you do you will have to translate this text and in the translating of it, re-make it.

Poetic Language. Not only is The Iliad written in old time Greek , but the text uses poetic devices all over the place. It uses a whole lot of symbolism, metaphor, epic simile, and more. It talks about pastoral images a lot (like leaves and fields and leopards), which seems really weird when you read it the first time. The poem has a specific rhythm and meter and all that (which I will NOT explain because poetic forms is not my forte). It repeats a lot of phrases, because this is what poets used to help them remember what came next in the poem. That’s why Athena is often spoken of as “grey-eyed” and the sea is “wine-dark.” These phrases not only fit the meter of the poem, BUT also helped the poet remember where he was in the poem when he was dramatically reciting to the masses.

Repetition. Because Homer’s poems were recited out loud to crowds there is a WHOLE lot of repetition, just in case someone wanders around the campfire/into the crowd and doesn’t know what happened yet; or in case someone dozed off; or in case some poor child was fighting desperately to focus but, really?, couldn’t. Also, #becausepoetry. (That is the only explanation you’re going to get out of me, because I am that bad at poetic vocabulary/definitions.)

Values, Ethics, and Moral Ideals. Some of the ancient Greek/Roman values and ethics will overlap with our modern ones; some of them definitely won’t. Don’t be quick to judge, but try to think of the world through their eyes. They don’t have phones or fancy magic devices, they barely have swords. They don’t have burger fast food places, they have fields of barley and a whole lot of drought. No cars, but difficult seas that sometimes stranded you for three months because of the currents and the weather. Their world is going to be different than ours, so their values are going to reflect that. Also, they live in a different time period, in a different land, with a different religious outlook (unless you are a Hellenic Reconstructionist of some sort, in which case, the differences religiously won’t be as bad). Even if they didn’t live in such a different time/place, remember: your values, ethics, and moral ideals could be different from your next-door neighbors values, ethics, and moral ideals, so it’s important to be able to understand and be aware of this PFM in particular, because it is something that will show up in your day to day life.

Some other points to remember when considering authorship, particularly with ancient Greek or Roman works, is that the person who created/wrote it was:

Male. (Unless possibly Sappho). It is sad, but true. Until you get to Anna of Byzantium, outside of some poetry, it’s all males all the time, and that bias shows, sometimes like #WHAT.

Educated. You don’t write things down if you aren’t educated. Mostly because you can’t write things down if you don’t know how words or alphabets work. #thisshouldbeobvious

Probably middle/upper class. You don’t get educated if you don’t have monies.

Sexist. Women are poetic devices at best. Some authors are less sexist than others, but yeah. The Greek and Roman world is INCREDIBLY male-centric/phallo-centric, whatever fancy term you want to use to describe it. Sometimes this is painful. I try to be fair, because that is the world they grew up in, but sometimes my own bias will come out in a roar, so be prepared for that.

Polytheist. Whether hardcore, fairly agnostic, meh, or more atheistic, the polytheist view is going to color EVERYTHING in the Greek/Roman world. If you are used to a monotheistic viewpoint, I promise you, some things in these texts just won’t jive and will leave you flummoxed. Do your best.

Ethnicity/Race. Greeks are VERY pro-Greek everyone else is stupid/barbaric/uncivilized/a cannibal. Romans are VERY pro-Roman everyone else is stupid/barbaric/uncivilized/not as good as us. The Greek worldview is very anti-anyone else (part of their hatred of Thrace). The Romans are very We Are The Most Awesome HAHAHAHA, which is why they downplay the importance of Etruria like #WHAT. So whenever a Greek/Roman author is talking about someone/a group that isn’t part of their group, BE AWARE, a bias is happening.

There are other lenses that authors look through that create their bias, of course. These are just some basic things to keep in mind. A future post delving into ancient Greek ethics/values may happen one day, and at that time will be linked to HERE. But not this day.

ALSO: Obviously, I am an author so I have a bias. All of these categories also relate to what I’m writing. While I do try my best to be accurate and fair, sometimes I, like Herodotus, exaggerate/gossip/re-invent because it makes a story, quite simply, better. Keep this in mind and forgive me my re-interpretations of text, as I forgive those who re-interpreted before me.

The story: he was a blind poet who was freaking awesome and created both The Illiad and The Odyssey and one day some sycophant wrote it all down for him.

The more probable truth: The Illiad and The Odyssey were oral tales told by wandering poets for generations and one day someone or someones decided to write them down for posterity.

Why is this more likely? Two reasons!

Because both of Homer’s epic poems mix references to both The Stone Age and The Bronze Age. They cannot decide where in time they actually are.

This is what happened with the Finnish Kalevala, giving us a historical precedent and all that. The Kalevala was an oral tradition and was later written down by Elias Lönnrot.

Maybe Homer was the Elias Lönnrot of the ancient Greek world, maybe not. HOWEVER: a random blind poet living in a cave is way more amusing, so we’re just going to pretend like he exists.

*EXTRA CREDIT*

Question: Why was Homer a blind poet?

Answer: There are a collection of poems called The Homeric Hymns which were not all written by Homer (and maybe none of them were) but for quite some time people thought they WERE all written by Homer. In one of the poems, “Hymn 3 To Apollon” lines 171-173 to be exact, it says:

“Do tell him in unison that I am he,/a blind man, dwelling on the rocky island of Chios,/whose songs shall all be the best in time to come.”